AWS Announces Seven New Compute Services and Capabilities to Support an Even Wider Range of Workloads

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com
company (NASDAQ:AMZN), announced the next generation of Amazon Elastic
Compute Cloud (EC2) Memory Optimized, Compute Optimized, and High
input/output (I/O) instances, and added two new hardware acceleration
options to its range of compute services. The new F1 instance is the
cloud’s first customer-programmable, hardware-accelerated compute
instance with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Amazon EC2 Elastic
GPUs allow customers to easily attach low-cost, professional grade
graphics acceleration to Amazon EC2 instances. AWS also announced Amazon
Lightsail, a new way to get started with AWS that makes it easy to spin
up powerful virtual private servers (VPS) that have bundled storage and
networking with simple, monthly pricing. To get started with Amazon EC2,
visit https://aws.amazon.com/new/reinvent/compute/.

“With ten instance families, AWS offers customers, by far, the broadest
and deepest range of compute functionality to support an incredibly wide
range of applications. From very low cost, burstable T2 general-purpose
instances for websites and M4 instances for business applications like
SAP, to our new P2 instances for machine learning and HPC applications –
and everything in between – AWS delivers the right compute option for
virtually any workload today,” said Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon
EC2. “Most companies have many diverse applications with varying
requirements. They’ve told us having the ability to choose the right
instance for the right workload allows them to have optimal price
performance and move faster. Today, we expanded this range of options
even further by adding a way to help customers get started quickly with
Amazon Lightsail, introducing the next generation of our Memory,
Compute, and Storage Optimized instance families, and delivering
hardware acceleration with Elastic GPUs and FPGA-enabled F1 instances.”

Available today are two larger sizes of T2 Burstable Performance
Instances, which provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the
ability to burst to full core performance when needed. The new
t2.xlarge offers 16 GiB of memory and 4 vCPU, and the new t2.2xlarge
offers 32 GiB of memory and 8 vCPU. Customers with existing T2
workloads can now scale up to the larger T2 sizes if desired.

Available today, R4 instances are designed for high performance
databases, distributed memory caches, in-memory analytics, genome
assembly and analysis, and other enterprise applications. They feature
a larger L3 cache that is twice the size of the previous generation
(R3), a new 16xlarge size that offers twice the memory as the previous
generation with 488 GiB of fast, DDR4 memory, and 64 vCPUs (two times
as many as the largest R3) – all for 20 percent less per GiB of RAM
than the previous generation R3 instances.

Coming in early 2017, C5 instances include the next generation of the
Intel Xeon Processor family (code named Skylake) with AVX 512 and up
to 72 vCPUs (twice that of previous generation C4 compute-optimized
instances), and 144 GiB of memory, making them the best price to
compute performance of any Amazon EC2 instance. C5 instances also
feature new AWS hardware acceleration that delivers three times the
Amazon EBS bandwidth of C4 instances for workloads that require high
amounts of IOPs. C5 instances are ideal for batch processing,
distributed analytics, high performance science and engineering
applications, ad serving, massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming,
and video encoding.

Coming in early 2017, I3 instances are ideal for the most demanding
I/O-intensive relational databases, NoSQL databases, transactional
systems, and analytics workloads. I3 instances feature twice the
memory and vCPUs as the previous generation high I/O instance family
(I2), and over two times the storage as the previous generation with
15.2 TB of fast, low latency locally attached storage backed by Non
Volatile Memory Express (NVMe)-based SSDs. Additionally, I3 instances
deliver up to nine times the IOPs as the previous generation with 3.3
million random IOPS at 4 KB block size, and offer total I/O throughput
of 16 GiB per second.

F1 instances – custom FPGA hardware acceleration for all

A growing set of applications such as genomics research, financial
analysis, and video processing push the boundaries of what customers can
do with a CPU. For these applications, developers can program
acceleration algorithms that are custom-tailored for their specific
workloads directly into silicon by using FPGAs. Until now, this type of
custom hardware acceleration has been prohibitively expensive, time
consuming, and limited to those who work at companies that can afford
the significant fixed cost at scale. The new Amazon EC2 F1 instance is
the first cloud instance with programmable hardware for FPGA application
acceleration. Customers can program their own FPGAs to increase
performance by as much as 30x over general-purpose CPUs. The F1 instance
FPGA Developer AMI and Hardware Developer Kit include everything a
developer needs to develop, simulate, debug, and compile hardware
acceleration code. Once the FPGA design is complete, developers can save
it as an Amazon FPGA Image (AFI) and deploy it to an F1 instance with
just a few clicks. Developers can also bring their own FPGA designs, or
go to the AWS Marketplace to find pre-built AFIs that include common
hardware accelerations. FPGAs are connected to F1 instances through a
dedicated, isolated network fabric and are not shared across instances,
users, or accounts, making them fast and secure.

Maxeler's Multiscale Dataflow Computing (MDC) technology delivers the
next generation of algorithms at a cost comparable to lower fidelity
approaches. “Maxeler helps our clients leverage our dataflow computing
infrastructure to rapidly create application accelerators running on
FPGAs. In the dataflow approach to processing, pipelines of tasks
exploit temporal and spatial parallelism, offering dramatic performance
improvements,” said Oskar Mencer, Chief Executive Officer, Maxeler
Technologies. “With a strong research division and many Dataflow
applications developed using our tools, the time and expense of
deploying hardware appliances on-premises becomes the bottleneck. With
Amazon FPGA Images and F1 instances integrated into the AWS Marketplace,
we can now publish our Dataflow applications to over a million AWS
customers who can deploy them with one click. This substantially
simplifies bringing new innovations to market and enables us to focus on
new algorithms and supporting customers.”

NGCodec is a provider of video compression technology. “Cloud video
encoding is exploding, but traditional software approaches need massive
CPU resources and cannot deliver the video quality and latency
necessitated by new applications. We have developed a next generation
video encoder that, using FPGA hardware acceleration, offers low latency
and low cost while maximizing video quality to keep up with today’s
broadcasting standards,” said Oliver Gunasekara, Chief Executive Officer
and co-founder, NGCodec. “AWS is the first cloud provider to add FPGA
instances, which provide massive acceleration. In just three weeks, we
ported our RealityCodec™ H.265/HEVC encoder to the new F1 instance type
to enable AWS Cloud customers to leverage the benefits of higher video
quality, lower latency, and lower cost for live H.265/HEVC video
encoding. Updating our install base globally will be as simple as
publishing a new Amazon FPGA image and re-launching F1 instances.”

CME Group is one of the world's leading derivatives marketplace offering
risk management solutions, including futures and options, equity
indexes, foreign exchange, energy, agricultural products, and metals.
“Large-scale financial clearing risk management is essential to
delivering value for our customers,” said Kevin Kometer, Chief
Information officer, Chief Information Officer, CME Group. “CME Group
has long been an innovator in the use of accelerated computing, for the
clearning risk management of increasingly complex instruments, including
extensive research into FPGAs. Amazon EC2 F1 instances will allow us to
substantially accelerate rate of innovation of risk analysis for our
customers, while delivering greater cost efficiency relative to using
traditional IT infrastructure.”

Amazon EC2 provides two families of GPU-based instances today: G2
instances for graphics-intensive applications like 3D application
streaming, video encoding, and other server-side graphics workloads, and
P2 instances for general-purpose GPU compute applications like machine
learning, high performance databases, and other server-side workloads
requiring massive parallel floating point processing power. While these
instances are very popular, there are times when customers need a small
amount of GPU for graphics acceleration, or have applications that could
benefit from some GPU, but also require high amounts of compute, memory,
or storage, making them less suited to the G2 or P2 instances. Elastic
GPUs is a new Amazon EC2 feature that provides flexible,
workstation-quality GPUs that customers can attach to existing Amazon
EC2 instance types in much the same way as customers can attach Amazon
EBS volumes. With Amazon Elastic GPUs, customers can configure the right
amount of graphics acceleration for their particular workload without
being constrained by fixed hardware configurations and limited GPU
selection. Amazon Elastic GPUs are planned to support OpenGL and offer
up to 8 GiB of GPU memory, making them ideally suited for any workload
that needs additional GPUs such as gaming, industrial design, HPC
visualization, 3D modeling, rendering, or virtual desktops.

ANSYS is a global leader in engineering simulation. “ANSYS Enterprise
Cloud delivers a virtual simulation data center optimized for AWS. It
delivers a rich interactive graphics experience critical to supporting
the end-to-end engineering simulation processes that allow our customers
to deliver innovative product designs. With Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs,
ANSYS will be able to more easily deliver this experience right-sized to
the price and performance needs of our customers,” said Ray Milhem, Vice
President, Enterprise Solutions & Cloud, ANSYS, Inc. “We are certifying
ANSYS applications to run on Elastic GPUs to enable our customers to
innovate more efficiently on the cloud.”

Siemens PLM Software is a world-leading provider of product lifecycle
management and manufacturing operations management software. “Amazon EC2
Elastic GPUs is a game-changer for Computer Aided Design (CAD) in the
cloud,” said Bob Haubrock, Vice President, NX Product Management,
Siemens PLM. “With Elastic GPUs, our customers can now run Siemens PLM
NX on Amazon EC2 with professional-grade graphics, and take advantage of
the flexibility, security, and global scale that AWS provides. Siemens
PLM is excited to certify NX on the Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs platform to
help our customers push the boundaries of design and engineering
innovation.”

Amazon Lightsail – Powerful VPS made easy, starting at $5 per month

Sometimes, developers just want a server in the cloud to deploy their
code or run their software, and Amazon Lightsail provides the easiest
way for them to launch a VPS with just a few clicks. Amazon Lightsail
includes everything customers need for projects such as web sites,
blogs, custom applications, or development servers. Customers can get
started with just three clicks; they simply choose a virtual private
server image from a menu of over 10 images that includes Linux,
WordPress, Drupal, and others, and select one of five server sizes.
Amazon Lightsail automatically launches the VPS, attaches the SSD-based
storage, sets up the security groups, creates a Virtual Private Cloud
(VPC), and then makes it simple for developers to set up the DNS and IP
addresses. With Amazon Lightsail, customers can use preconfigured
operating system templates or pre-installed popular application setups.
Amazon Lightsail runs on the AWS Cloud, making it easy for customers to
connect to the more advanced services when they are ready. Amazon
Lightsail is available immediately, and customers pay a simple monthly
fee for each virtual private server, starting at $5 per month.

About Amazon Web Services

For 10 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 70
fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, analytics,
mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and enterprise applications from 38
Availability Zones (AZs) across 14 geographic regions in the U.S.,
Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and
India. AWS services are trusted by more than a million active customers
around the world -- including the fastest growing startups, largest
enterprises, and leading government agencies -- to power their
infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more
about AWS, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than
competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational
excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping,
personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle
Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa
are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more
information, visit www.amazon.com/about.

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